


artillerie lourde

by muined



Category: Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
Genre: M/M, Variations on a theme
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-01
Updated: 2019-01-01
Packaged: 2019-10-02 06:00:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 9,351
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17258861
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/muined/pseuds/muined
Summary: Cathcart/Korn vignettes, amalgamated here for your, um, convenience.





	1. attaboy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Immediately post-Chapter 40; almost canon-compliant, one-sided, pitch-black.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter 40, “Catch-22,” ends with the following paragraph:
>
>> _Yossarian waved goodbye fondly to his new pals and sauntered out onto the balcony corridor, almost bursting into song the instant he was alone. He was home free: he had pulled it off; his act of rebellion had succeeded; he was safe, and he had nothing to be ashamed of to anyone. He started toward the staircase with a jaunty and exhilarated air. A private in green fatigues saluted him. Yossarian returned the salute happily, staring at the private with curiosity. He looked strangely familiar. When Yossarian returned the salute, the private in green fatigues turned suddenly into Nately's whore and lunged at him murderously with a bone-handled kitchen knife that caught him in the side below his upraised arm. Yossarian sank to the floor with a shriek, shutting his eyes in overwhelming terror as he saw the girl lift the knife to strike at him again. He was already unconscious when Colonel Korn and Colonel Cathcart dashed out of the office and saved his life by frightening her away._
> 
> Yossarian was unconscious; this fic assumes that things didn’t happen quite so neatly as he was told they did after he regained consciousness.

Maybe Korn had developed his habit of leaning out of doorways after people had left the room, to watch them go, in service of his broader pursuit of ogling Cathcart’s ass whenever possible. Or maybe it had been the recent rash of assassination attempts on base, ascribed by not-particularly-reputable sources to a single apparently very stealthy Italian whore. Well, it was related to the latter possibility now, at least, because Korn, leaning out of Cathcart’s office, had just caught said whore in the act of stabbing his new pal Yo-Yo. Only seconds after the bombardier had taken Korn up on his deal, had shook on it and bid him so long, pal, the whore, in fatigues, had flown at Yossarian, stabbing him once in the kidney before fleeing down the staircase at the far end of the balcony corridor. Yossarian produced a pained howl and crumpled to his knees, then his side.

Korn shut the office door.

“What was that?” Cathcart had retired to his desk at the far end of the room after Yossarian’s exit but was now standing ramrod-straight as if at attention.

Thinking fast, Korn told him: “Be very quiet.” He flicked off the room’s overhead light and lowered the blinds on the window. Locked the door. “Colonel, there’s a Nazi assassin outside.”

The rule of thumb Korn operated by, when duty to his country called upon him to lie, was that it was easier to lie _to_ Cathcart than it was to bring Cathcart in on a lie and expect him to perpetuate it competently. This principle had been demonstrated prior with the legality of the tomato farm: Korn was, and remained, the _lawyer_. So long as Cathcart had no cause to doubt his authority, he tended to ask few questions. Korn, still at the door, looked meaningfully back at Cathcart. “You’ve probably read about this sort of thing in the _Saturday Evening Post_.”

Cathcart nodded vigorously. He had crouched in his seat, shoulders close to the glossy surface of the desk, as if prepared to curl beneath it at a moment’s notice.

“That’s the way, Colonel. You go ahead and hide. Er, take shelter. Remember, you’re our greatest asset. Indispensable. Attaboy.”

Korn turned back to the window, made a show for Cathcart of cautiously parting the Venetian blinds. “I think he’s gone. Now, Chuck, you stay put. I’m going to go see if anyone was hurt—go ahead and call the MPs while I’m out.”

“Thank God we’re safe.”

“Yes,” Korn smiled, cherishing privately both Cathcart’s performative schoolboy faith and his use of “we,” regardless of whether it was technically royal. “Thank God.” Cathcart possessed a vendetta against Yossarian that had flourished under Korn's tutelage, but he possessed also an awkward, cumbersome conscience that tended to get in the way of things; this is why Korn had decided against telling him. If he knew that Yossarian lay just beyond their threshold bleeding out onto the tiled balustrade, Cathcart was liable to charge out and act the hero, as he had in Milo's raid on the base. That wouldn't do. “But I wouldn’t count your chickens, Colonel. Word must’ve gotten around to the krauts about what an admirable job you’re doing. We’re going to have to be more careful.” He cracked open the door, slipped out.

Yossarian was where Korn had left him, albeit wetter. The building was silent, all other officers out for the time being. No witnesses, as Korn had assumed. Korn toed Yossarian—turned him over onto his back with one boot. Yossarian moaned, not like he ever had in the briefing room, but gutturally. “Shhhh,” Korn told him, a finger to his lips. Yossarian arched his back, opened his eyes. The smell of blood was acrid, cloying; Korn, squeamish, was disgusted. He stood over Yossarian’s head and leaned against the wall, hands in his pockets. “Now, Yo-yo,” he hissed. “You are going to keep your end of our deal, aren’t you?”

“A doctor,” Yossarian wheezed.

“Answer the question.”

Yossarian mouthed a “yes,” before his eyes rolled back into his head.

“Well, good. You’ll have your doctor soon—hell, you’ll have more doctors than you’ll know what to do with back in the States, so long as your memories of your time here remain roseate. You’ll be up to your ears in doctors. Now, in the event that you renege,” Korn nudged Yossarian back over onto his side, provoking another sharp exhalation. Possibly it had been with more force than was strictly necessary; that was in his nature, and Korn couldn’t help his nature. “We’ll be sure to keep that wop girlfriend of yours close at hand. Awfully proficient with a knife, isn’t she? Maybe we’ll get a room for her so she can stay around the base full-time—maybe we’ll make her a WAC. That is if you go back on your word, Yo-yo.” He noticed then that Yossarian was unconscious, or playing at it. “Think it over,” he added, in the event that it was the latter. He returned to the office. 

There had been a Nazi assassin, but he had gone: Korn reassured Cathcart of this. “He may still be near at hand.” 

“Well, obviously. I’ve phoned already and alerted the MPs to the threat.” Cathcart, immensely proud of his limited competence, was now again seated in his chair, and though the desk’s facade kept them from his line of sight Korn knew the colonel’s ankles were crossed, boyishly, one over another. If he could have only this—he yearned continually for the chance to dissect Cathcart, to ascertain how he was made, but if this, the inexplicable, precious finished product, was all Korn would get—it would be enough. 

Korn cleared his throat. “Yossarian. Our new pal, Chuck?”

“What about him?”

“I spoke to him outside; he had a scuffle with the assassin. You might look into having an official report made up about it, his having protected us. It would fall in line with the rest of our deal.” And it would. This lie would preserve the mythos of Yossarian as patriot, as hero, the larger lie that he and Cathcart had begun crafting after Kraft in Ferrara. An errant, inexplicable knife-wielding interloper added nothing to the narrative. If Korn was right, and he was seldom wrong, Yossarian would be convinced further by a taste of mortality of the necessity of his sticking with his new pals. And Yossarian’s friends would be convinced further by the doctored incident report of his loyalty to the colonels. And Cathcart?

Cathcart shifted in his seat. “Could you take care of it, Korn? I’m occupied now with the Chaplain.”

Ah, his pet project. “Sure. This is the tomato theft?”

“It isn’t the tomato that’s the issue, Korn, but the principle of the thing! He lied to me. And he’s a man of God.” God again. “Really, I consider it inexcusable. There have to be consequences for lying.”

Here was another facet of Cathcart that endeared him to Korn: his bullying campaigns. “Oh, I agree entirely, Colonel.” Korn found it sweet that individually, without consultation with one another, he and Cathcart had each come upon the group’s chaplain and found in him an ideal punching bag. Korn parted the blinds, looked out the window again; Yossarian was gone. “I’ll be off, then.” Without turning to face Cathcart he made his way toward the door, but before he reached it: there it was. A catch in the colonel’s throat, a nearly inaudible stifled protest. Korn gave no indication that he had heard, continued out. 

Rushed, his words overlapping: “Korn, maybe you’d better stay.” 

Korn didn’t smile. “Why’s that?”

“Well, it’s—it’s dangerous out there, isn’t it?”

“Isn’t it always?” he countered, fliply, glibly. Then he saw that Cathcart has a deck of cards out on the desk, clasped between his hands. “What, Colonel, do you want to play cards?” Cathcart nodded, so Korn drew back to him, nearer the desk and the back of the room. “Bridge strategies, hm, for our next match with Cargill and Moodus?” Korn referred to their colonels-only Bridge nights, at which Korn was both the most senior and lowest-ranking member, only included on a technicality and because they didn’t have another full colonel at hand.

“No. Something I’m good at.”

Something he was good at. How precious. “You aren’t going to get any better at Bridge if you don’t practice.”

Something behind Cathcart’s eyes went flat. “We’ll cheat, Korn, like we always do. Now, I want something like—War. I _clean up_ at War.”

Well, yes, War was a game of chance so it followed that Cathcart'd win fifty percent of the time, which was his approximate margin: apparently his standard of “cleaning up,” his threshold for it. But Korn doesn't bring this up. Cathcart’s ready acceptance of cheating had surprised and charmed him. Cathcart in jodhpurs and jackboots, with riding crop, his Venus in Furs. Spoiled, or spoilt, he guessed was the word. Obviously Cathcart had been, and Korn would have that the trend continue. For Cathcart to have everything he wanted and be ruined for it. For Cathcart to make general and to find that it changed nothing. Korn looked at Cathcart and saw every failure of the American military, American society, or, rather, the prefab triumph of a system designed for evil. The fact that Cathcart was a group commander was a war crime. Obviously, obviously. And Korn gave up on being bothered by these things a long time ago. Where resentment should have been, within him, there remained only a bemused affection. Cathcart was a schoolyard bully. He seemed never to’ve learned how to walk properly. Korn couldn’t decide whether he wanted first to fuck or be fucked by Cathcart. Preferably both, in rapid succession. He’d allow circumstances to dictate if said circumstances were e’er presented to him. What he and Cathcart had could never approach the bond shared by the enlisted men—buddyhood—but they did have something. Unidirectional, warped, Morganatic, and theirs.

“Will comply,” Korn said. He sat down to make War.


	2. go forth and multiply!

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cathcart and Korn negotiate. The completely batshit A/B/O AU I felt the need to write because I knew no one else would.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is purest crack; I went in thinking it was going to be sort of a loving sendup of omegaverse fic, but halfway through I got more interested in the dog bullshit than the sex bullshit. For reference, I guess I imagine the dogpeople here as approximately as anthropomorphized as the dogpeople in _Meitantei Holmes_ / _Sherlock Hound_.

> _Colonel Cathcart bewailed the miserable fate that had given him for an invaluable assistant someone as common as Colonel Korn._

It begins, or Korn is first made aware of it, when one May afternoon he is called into Cathcart’s office. This is not unusual; his daily visits to Cathcart’s office tally in the double digits. Korn knows that the group hospital’s psychologist, Major Sanderson, has in discrete confidence diagnosed the group commander with separation anxiety.

Cathcart is a purebred, and has the "P" to prove it stamped into the military-issue dog tag he wears on his collar, next to the "O" for omega. His pedigree hangs on the wall behind his desk; he delights in inviting guests to examine it. Soon after meeting Korn and discovering that he was a mix, Cathcart made several misfired attempts to lord his own storied heritage over his deputy commander—“Touch of the Orient in you, Blackie?” he had asked once, indicating the deep, dull tan folds of Korn’s face, the tight curl of his tail—before discovering that Korn really truly, madly, deeply did not care. This formed the basis for their enduring relationship.

Cathcart was a King Charles Spaniel, had breed standard blue-black curls punctuated with patches of tawny red. He claimed to have descended from poet-spaniel Lord Byron (and Korn believed him; Cathcart had retained, obviously, his ancestor's flair for the dramatic) as well as from the British monarch who lent his breed its name. "Charles was my sire's name, and before him my grandsire's name. It's familial," Cathcart had explained cheerfully.

He was exceptionally large for a toy dog: "You're awfully big for a King Charles, aren't you?" Korn had asked one day, offhand.

Cathcart had bristled, sniffed. "I represent a return to type, to the ancestral type of larger, heartier dogs. And I'm not so unusual, you know, especially in the States. It isn’t the _nineteenth century_ anymore, Korn. They’ve raised the weight threshold for exhibition since then." Cathcart’d had a brief career as a showdog before the war, and competition seemed to have bequeathed to him a litter of complexes, with which Korn never tired of toying. "And—and size is desirable in broodstock, I'll have you know." Korn had held up both paws in surrender. He knew when to stop; more than once he had caught Cathcart studying his profile in the mirror, self-conscious about the flatness of his snout.

“Korn,” Cathcart asks now, from behind his desk. “You haven’t, er, sired before, have you?” Korn answers in the negative, and Cathcart squirms in his seat. “Well, have you, have you considered it?” Korn realizes first that Cathcart is in heat, and second that Cathcart is propositioning him. “You see, I’ve received a suggestion, from above, that I should lead the men by example.” Now that Korn is aware of Cathcart’s condition, he hears it in his voice, detects it in his scent. “Breed no object; I was chosen for my leadership abilities, and it's an initiative to produce, you know, strategists, not candidates for the Kennel Club circuit,” Cathcart, who Korn knows to be incapable of effective leadership, explains. “Not that you aren't good-looking," he adds, belatedly tactful. "With my intellect, and your loyalty..." he trails off, clacking his dewclaws together.

"You're telling me you want us to have a litter," Korn says. It is a statement. Cathcart is taken aback. His typically wide, watery cornflower-blue eyes widen further. He blinks.

"Well, I, yes, I suppose so."

Korn, nonplussed, badgers him a little further. "Puppies don't just fly out into the ether, Chuck, they go somewhere."

Cathcart becomes defensive. "I know that!" he barks. "I just imagined that Headquarters would, I don't know, would take charge of them soon after I'd, I'd, well, you know."

"Say I don't."

"After I'd given birth, okay? You're horrible! You don't think I'm ready for this, do you?"

"I don't think your being too prudish for a frank discussion of what pregnancy entails is a great sign, Colonel." Korn pushes his glasses up the wrinkly bridge of his snout. "If you just want to have sex, now, then forget about whelping and give me that dick of yours, huh?" They have fucked before, of course, usually with Cathcart topping because although neither prefers it Korn is better at persuasion. It’s been less than a year since they met; Korn hadn’t yet endured a heat of Cathcart’s.

Cathcart whines. "But I need you, Blackie," he pants, and the look on his face is almost enough to goad Korn into capitulating.

On occasion, Korn, astonishingly virile for a dog approaching seven years of age, will wake up hard and unusually selfless. Possessed with a spirit of generosity, he will bestow upon Cathcart a morning gift, as they lay side by side in Cathcart's bed—of late their shared bed—in Group Headquarters and the Italianate sun streams in through the near window. Korn will smack Cathcart's haunches, and with some effort will turn the colonel over onto his side and mount him, the both of them still half-prone and Cathcart still half-asleep, until he isn’t. Korn will, wordlessly, from behind, work one paw into the spot above Cathcart's thigh that causes his leg to twitch involuntarily; Cathcart relishes these mornings immensely. Afterward he will want eggs and chicory root coffee with his bacon and Korn will oblige, sending word ahead to the pernicious little Yorkshire Terrier, Milo, who is always underfoot but indispensable to the colonels, insomuch as their care and feeding is concerned.

Cathcart doesn’t let up; on the contrary, the intensity of his campaigning only heightens. In his office he appeals to Korn with an argument for the patriotism inherent in reproduction, referring reverentially to the portrait of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a basset hound, that hangs on the wall opposite. Their coupling would have been some level of taboo just a few years ago, but it was wartime now and everyone was expected to pitch in and do their part; this included producing as many puppies as possible to bolster the ranks of the American fighting forces. They would mature in less than a year and the war wouldn't be over for at least as long. Wing Headquarters, in Rome, requisitioned puppies each breeding season, had set a general minimum quota of litters per base that Cathcart had already raised twofold in hopes of impressing Generals Dreedle and Peckem—a distinguished mastiff and elegant poodle, respectively. These were orders to which the dogs of Pianosa took, for once, with gusto, and now it seemed that Cathcart too had caught puppy fever. Korn sighs. Most all of the pheromones that whizzed around the base this time of year bypassed Korn entirely; he was a beta, and as such subject only to milder, more manageable whims.

"I'm tired of waiting," Cathcart keeps complaining, in bed with Korn at night, when all activity in the building had stilled and Korn can pick up through the open window the scents of laurel sumac, rosemary and wild figs on the night breeze—along with the constant of ocean salt. It is, come to think of it, unusual that Cathcart hadn't yet been bonded, a reasonably good-looking dog of Cathcart's age from a powerful family. Maybe that was it: the family was holding out for a suitable mate from a line of equal stature. And if they wanted to keep their own corner of the breed more or less preserved, Cathcart may have had to wait around for a while; there weren't, as the colonel frequently noted, many King Charleses in the world. Cathcart and his kin possessed delicate constitutions, hadn’t fared well in the Great War and had struggled to rebound in the span of years between then and now. The interwar bottleneck—Cathcart had told him all about it. And then there was Cathcart's personality, which may well have been a prohibitive factor. Up until now. Korn marvels, not for the first time, on his ending up here, on this Tuscan island, the advisor and mate-to-be of a repressed, tyrannical toy Spaniel. Aiding and abetting; the two of them coiled here against one another in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea.

Korn doesn't sex him the following morning, but does agree to play a game of tennis with him on the little court adjacent to the skeet range, as was their tradition in fair weather.

"Now, this isn't just an effort to get into the _Saturday Evening Post_ , I hope,” Korn asks, serving, after Cathcart brings up puppies again.

"No!" Cathcart rejoins, and then falls silent. "But a promotion wouldn't be out of the question."

"We'd need to get a wet nurse. And you're sure you want to, ah, to taint your family bloodline? Wouldn’t it be a black eye if your parents disowned you?"

This is intended as a sendup of Cathcart's preoccupation with good breeding, but Korn’s humor is wasted on the colonel. "Well, before the war I may have had reservations, but things have changed. Things are changing all over." And they were, too: getting acquainted in the past few years with the Germans and their predilection for a certain school of reproductive pseudoscience had taken the shine off of prior American breed purity preservation efforts. Long-suppressed science concerning the benefits of outcrossing was now coming to light. From the high yew hedges around the tennis court came birdsong.

"I'm no alpha; we won't make a pair. You'll be tied down, you know, bonded to me, but I'll have no such constraints. We'll be lopsided."

Cathcart's ears press flat against his head; he says nothing, grunts as he returns Korn's volley.

"And you'll lose your figure."

This gives Cathcart pause. "I'm very disciplined, Blackie. I could drop puppy weight fast," he decides, retrieving the ball, and then serves, ineptly. He couldn't, and wouldn't, but it isn't at all difficult for Korn to resign himself to this.

"That's thirty-love," he announces, wearily, and then, after a pause: "I concede."

Cathcart is baffled. "But you're winning?"

"I mean I'll fuck you, Chuck. You've worn me down."

Cathcart's racket clatters on the paved surface of the court. "Oh, Blackie!" he cries, and bounds over the net to embrace Korn, slobbering all over him.

"Now, there's going to be a whole lot of paperwork, if this is to be mediated by the military, and it will be," Korn begins, practical. "We'll be made to have a ceremony, but I suppose Special Services can take care of that—”

"We won't be lopsided at all," Cathcart pulls back, beaming. "I'm your commanding officer, so you already answer to me. My being bonded will only even things out a little."

No, Korn thinks, no, Cathcart is already his bitch; this formal alteration to their relationship will serve only to marry the biological with the metaphorical.

The group’s doctor, Daneeka, a diminutive black Scottish Terrier, keeps a tank of snub-nosed frogs in his tent with which to perform fertility tests, and so after the deed is done he takes a urine sample from Cathcart and the next day delivers the news, flanked on both sides by Gus and Wes, two enormous Saint Bernards. Cathcart is to be a dam. Korn reserves a whelping-box in the base hospital for August. They are married in the small chapel on base by the group chaplain, an Airedale Terrier who throughout the ceremony appears horrified by the fact that he has been made to facilitate such a union and the creatures it is to bring into the world. Rightly so, for Cathcart and Korn beget six of the ugliest flat-faced puppies ever, each of whom hates both of them passionately.

END

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Rejected titles for this fic include: “Fetch-22,” “Dogs of War,” “Hounds of Love,” “Familiarity Breeds Contempt,” “Creature Comforts,” “Animal Husbandry,” and, colloquially, “the Corndogs Fic.” Anyway, footnotes:
> 
>   * Each of the historical figures Cathcart cites as ancestors was a prominent owner of King Charles Spaniels.
>   * Chicory root is a caffeine-free substitute for coffee, popular in the Great Depression; obviously this is what anthropomorphic dogpeople would drink, yes.
>   * Daneeka’s pregnancy test, featuring African clawed frogs, is what really would have been performed in the 1940s for, um, actual real humans.
>   * If you’re interested in weird early twentieth century toy spaniel fancy, read Judith Lytton’s _Toy Dogs and their Ancestors_ , available of the Internet Archive. That is all.
> 

> 
> If it wasn’t obvious, Korn is at least part shar-pei. And, for fun, descriptions of all the airmen—er, airdogs—that I didn’t get a chance to include in the story proper:
> 
>   * Yossarian: “A wiry-legged and wiry-coated mutt, dark in color. Perhaps feral—Cathcart suspects that sufficient distance hasn't been placed between Yossarian's wild ancestors and his current incarnation. Too much of the wolf in the creature, a palpable anti-authoritarian streak.”
>   * Clevinger: “An oxymoronically myopic sighthound, thin and watery-eyed and wet-nosed. Clevinger's breast heaved as he spoke.”
>   * Orr: “Another mutt. How he had made it through basic obedience training Cathcart had no idea.”
>   * Nately: A corgi, “from the royal bloodline.”
>   * Danby: A beagle.
>   * McWatt: A bulldog.
>   * Black: A doberman.
>   * Appleby and Havemeyer: Yellow and chocolate labs, respectively.
>   * de Coverley: a Schnauzer.
> 



	3. chuck + blackie 4ever

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ugh, Modern AU. An exercise in dragging Cathcart and his internal monologuing into T.Y.O.O.L. 2016 (the year in which I wrote the first draft of this, if you can believe it). Danby is in this one.

Cathcart crosses and uncrosses his legs. He would guess that he has been waiting here for Korn for approximately fifteen minutes, but upon reconsideration he would expand that discrete wager into a continuous sliding scale of anywhere from eight to thirty-five minutes. Not an hour, though. It couldn’t have been an hour, but then again the kohl-eyed teenager who had sat in the chair on the opposite wall when Cathcart arrived had been replaced by a wiry-haired middle-aged man squinting down through his bifocals at a hardbound book by someone named John McPhee. Cathcart hadn’t noticed this changeover when it happened, but the fact that it _had_ happened casts a shadow of doubt onto his conception of the rapidity with which time had been passing him, this afternoon and generally. Had it been an hour? Cathcart is sensitive about his poor sense of time; relatedly, he is sensitive about the time it takes him to read analog clocks. There isn’t one in the waiting room, thankfully—but wouldn’t an analog clock be preferable to no clock at all, to the seemingly endless, timeless expanse now before him? Asking at the reception desk isn’t an option.

He shifts again in his seat and remembers that he has a phone as with the change in pressure it makes itself known in his back pocket, against his left buttcheek. He fishes it out; on the lockscreen: 1:23. Oh. It had been only—Cathcart managed subtraction in his head—eleven minutes. Eleven minutes since Korn’s name had been called and he had followed the optometrist (ophthalmologist?) out of the waiting room. Cathcart had overshot—but only after he had second-guessed his initial estimate of fifteen minutes, which had been only four minutes off. That wasn’t bad at all. Cathcart congratulated himself, and made a mental memorandum to avoid overthinking things.

His phone: no new texts, from Korn or from anyone else, and he was running out of battery, and the ophthalmologist (optometrist’s?) wifi network was locked, and he had waited too long and missed his chance to ask the receptionist for the password, he felt. Even if he felt able to, Cathcart still wasn’t clear on whether there was or wasn’t someone behind that little window whose job it was to monitor in real time what the people in the waiting room were looking at on their phones. One could do that through wifi, couldn’t one? Cathcart was almost positive that one could; either way, it would be silly to ask. Not just silly: mortifyingly humiliating. And if he were to Google it, whoever’s wifi he was using would know exactly how ignorant he had remained for so long, and would probably laugh heartily at his expense. Korn, whom Cathcart assumed controlled the wifi in their home, would certainly laugh. Anyway, there was nothing that Cathcart could use his phone to look at that he would feel comfortable looking at while under surveillance: Facebook was out of the question, and Grindr beyond the pale.

It would be most prudent, Cathcart decides, to set his phone aside and to browse the waiting room’s selection of magazines. This was the healthier choice—by God, he was currently sequestered in a temple of whichever Greek or Roman god oversaw ophthalmological or optometrical health, and thus he’d do well to respect the sanctity of said temple by shielding his eyes from his phone’s offending screen. Something about blue wavelengths of light. The receptionist would bless his healthy choice with a silent look of approval. And his reading a magazine would look ever so much more impressive to the room’s other occupant, the McPhee-reader, who really wasn’t bad-looking, in a bland, professorial way. Cathcart leans over the coffee table before him and picks out an issue of _Time_ , the People of the Year edition—here was consequential, respectable reading material. He doesn’t, however, manage to turn his attention away from the splayed rainbow of magazines before alighting upon the latest _Real Simple_. _Real Simple_ had long held a seductive appeal for Cathcart. He was drawn in by the name, foremost: if only his life could be Real Simple! Cathcart would page through issues of the magazine at the supermarket magazine rack, but would replace it on the shelf as soon as another customer turned into the aisle, and of course he wouldn’t dare buy a copy, wouldn’t risk a cashier’s derisive look over the conveyor belt at checkout. He’d sooner die. But he continued to be attracted to the magazine’s title, and its sleek, elegant graphic design, and the clean minimalist lifestyle it promised. 

Cathcart reluctantly forgoes the _Real Simple_ , leaving it on the coffee table in the middle of the arc of other magazines, only a corner peeking out, and settles back in his seat with the _Time_ , hefting one ankle up over his other knee with a manful, meaningful grunt. He flips the issue open and sneaks a look up at his fellow waiter (waitee?), the handsome professor—to Sir, with love, from Cathcart. Crayons to perfume. Cathcart wonders whether maybe he is not only a professor but a Dean of Students or even of Faculty. He doesn’t seem to have taken any notice at all of Cathcart’s selection, though, and this provokes a twinge of disappointment in Cathcart, but he quickly shakes this off and turns to the People of the Year segment of the _Time_. He pages through it without reading the blurbs, clicking his tongue periodically in surprise, approval or disapproval at the recipients of the title for the benefit of, er, Sir. Cathcart notices that Kim Jong Un has taken to wearing glasses, handsome tortoiseshell glasses, which he admires—he wonders whether they would work for him. Cathcart looks up from the magazine and hunts for a similar pair on the far wall of the room, where prescriptionless frames are hung for patients' browsing pleasure; he is dismayed to note that he can see each pair in perfect definition, that his vision remains peskily non-deficient. He does not, of course, wear glasses. And he knows that Korn, stubborn non-aesthete that he is, will resist the suggestion that he upgrade his current pair of thick, square, rimless lenses. Then Cathcart looks again at Kim Jong Un on the page and realizes that taking sartorial cues from a dictator may be considered gauche in some circles, and congratulates himself on successfully avoiding this political faux pas.

He reaches the last Person of the Year and replaces the _Time_ on the table, issues a look to the man across the room that he hopes reads as vague dissatisfaction with the remaining reading material available tempered by a generous non-elitist willingness to sample the print publication of the hoi polloi. Oh, well; nothing better. The man remains absorbed in his book, and, seeing this, Cathcart scowls. He isn’t very handsome after all, Cathcart decides. Cathcart decides he can’t be a Dean, strips him of the title as quickly as he assigned it in the first place. He can’t possibly, Cathcart sees now, be anything more than an adjunct professor, at best. With a curt exhalation Cathcart lays his consolation prize, his long-anticipated _Real Simple,_ in his lap. He tears into it and quickly becomes engrossed in a woman’s account of her life on a houseboat. He finishes the article and finds the next page occupied entirely by what he at first assumes to be a satellite image of the surface of the sun, and thus is wholly prepared to skip. But then Cathcart realizes that it is in fact a close up of a bubbling half-melted sheet of cheese, such as that which one would find atop a pizza. He is now interested. He studies the paragraph that accompanies the photo spread and learns that the cheese depicted is called “Halloumi.” It squeaks when bitten and like a Middle American cheddar curd is solid, spreadable only when melted. What a finicky and precious specimen of chesedom. Cathcart’s mind is made up; he must have it.

But just as soon as he is availed of his present anxious circumstances by this new minor ambition, to obtain this rare and special cheese, he is assailed with a new wave of anxiety. Cathcart's body feels suddenly overlarge and cumbersome, as if he is trying to disembark from a train or taxi while carrying a bulky suitcase—but the suitcase is his own chest. A tinny high-pitched scream of horror escapes his throat. He feels incapable of anything. He tries breathing in and out, as he had learned in his fusion Spin/Zumba/Mindfulness class. Cathcart realizes that he must never have learned to breathe properly. He must have missed a day of kindergarten or preschool. Cathcart often found himself out of breath after climbing a flight of stairs; he chalked this up now to his lack of breathing expertise. He hoped it wasn’t a skill that could only really be acquired in childhood while one’s brain was still spongelike (Cathcart imagined children's’ brains to be textured like loofahs or kitchen sponges), like second languages—maybe there was a Rosetta Stone course for breathing. Maybe he could order a CD-ROM set that would teach him to breathe by phoning a number from an infomercial—no one would need to know that he hadn’t always possessed the knowledge innately. Unless it was apparent. Maybe everyone around him was already aware of this defect of his.

Korn appears, as he always does, in Cathcart’s hour of need. Nobody would call Korn handsome; he was categorically unhandsome. But Cathcart had affection for him. He resembled a sea lion: wrinkled, brown, bald. He resembled a browner, balder Dick Cheney. Cathcart had used that description to find Korn once, when he had lost track of him at Six Flags. They had used the loudspeakers to summon Korn to the Information Kiosk and had given Cathcart a balloon, which Korn had tied to his wrist once they had been reunited and after Cathcart had already had one close call with it.

Cathcart loves amusement parks. They are his second favorite public places, after hospitals. “Hospitals?” Korn had asked, looking askance at him, when first he’d professed this passion.

Cathcart had returned the look. Who didn’t like hospitals? They were orderly and efficient, and full of authoritative professional people, accredited people with acronyms both before and after their Christian names. People whose job it was to take care of you. As Cathcart explained, Korn’s face grew longer, his eyebrows encroached further upward and upon one another. Cathcart could never read that look of Korn’s.

The comparison—to Cheney—didn’t hold, now, because Korn was working on a beard that Cathcart would describe charitably as mildly piratical (Cathcart thought pirates were hot, generally), uncharitably as that of the ruler of a banana republic, and, accurately, as that of the guy on the back of those books of poetry one found sometimes in waiting rooms like this one, or more often in the waiting room of the pediatrician’s office where Cathcart went for his flu shot each year.

“Shel Silverstein?” Korn had asked, by way of clarification. Cathcart had nodded, and Korn had seemed mildly flattered. It was Love, what he and Korn had. Cathcart thought of the word as capitalized. They’d been divorced but were together again now, extralegally. Belinda was trying to break them up again but they’d weathered her disapproval successfully so far. They split in the first place primarily so that Belinda’s college tuition would be cheaper, but they’d both made an earnest effort to see other people, too, in a sort of mid-life rumspringa. They had each found that there was really no one for them but the other. Now they’d entered a bizarre second courting period; this is what upset Belinda so greatly. She was back from her first semester at Smith and had been unpleasantly surprised to find that Cathcart and Korn hd moved back in together.

"I guess we mate for life," Cathcart had shrugged, parroting a nature documentary he'd seen.

"Like wolf eels," Belinda had replied, drily. She'd watched it with him.

Cathcart gets up and follows Korn to the front desk, where he waves weakly to the clerk, and then out the door. He informs Korn of the New Cheese he has discovered.

“Come again?”

“Halloumi,” Cathcart repeats. He pronounces it with the same syllabic and phonetic intonation as he would “bologna.” That there may be another way to do so does not occur to him. “D’you think they’d have it at Ralph’s—in the New Arrivals section?” 

“The New Arrivals section of Ralph’s.”

“Yeah!”

Korn looks as if he’s going to say something, but doesn’t; instead he exhales. Maybe he is brushing up on his breathing technique; maybe he’s got ahold of the Rosetta Stone CD set before Cathcart has. That would be just like him. “Weren’t we going to IKEA—for that cake you like?”

“Princess cake. Oh, yes.” IKEA is probably Cathcart’s third-favorite public place, after hospitals and amusement parks.

Cathcart asks if Korn got his pupillary distance; no, it didn’t come with the prescription. They’ll have to go, after all, to a LensCrafters, and to lead an attendant there on, with the promise of buying glasses that day, into administering to Korn the pupillary distance test. Then later they’ll punch the numbers LensCrafters gives them into that website that sends glasses in the mail. Cathcart will be made to stand outside in the mall atrium while Korn pulls this scam within the LensCrafters; Cathcart somehow hasn’t yet managed to prove to Korn that he can _act natural_ with sufficient conviction. Sometimes Korn is inscrutable; try as he may Cathcart simply cannot scrute him.

FIN


	4. conjugal love

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> My ode to train travel in the Hudson Valley. Named for the Alberto Moravia novel, because, uh, why not.

_Le mise-en-scène_ : Late November, 1944. Nately dead, Dobbs dead. Eighty missions. Colonel Cathcart had in an Atlantic effort managed, incrementally, in units of five and ten, to raise the group’s mission requirement to eighty: a towering achievement, an unignorable sum. Wing would reward him now; so far as Korn could tell, the colonel was as impregnably convinced of this as he’d been when he’d first raised the missions to fifty, sixty, seventy.

But that Yossarian had refused to continue flying. Group headquarters (that is, Cathcart and Korn; a group of crows was a murder, and a Group of colonels—one Cathcart and one Korn—was a conspiracy. They were both conspiring) had just received word from Piltchard and Wren that the bombardier, their would-be mutineer, had just rejected their offer of limiting his remaining engagements to milk runs.

“Stubborn son-of-a-bitch,” Cathcart muttered as he paced his office. Yossarian was a thorn in the colonel’s side. Yossarian was the Grand High Poobah of the plot against his generalhood. Cathcart made this clear by wringing his hands and rolling his eyes like a distressed horse at the mention of Yossarian’s name. He had just gotten off the phone with the two squadron operations officers. “I just want everything to be simple again, Korn.”

The task of assuaging Cathcart’s nagging anxieties—and readying him for bed, for today there were to be no more negotiations—fell to Korn. He’d found that taking Cathcart’s mind off of the present, transporting him, was the most effective strategy. "And when were things simple, Chuck?” he asks from the doorframe.

Cathcart stops in the middle of the room, halfway across the trail he’d worn into his rug. “Korn—Blackie. Did you ride on a Pullman sleeper car to or from officer’s school?”

“I did. Both to and from, I think.”

Cathcart sighs. “Things were _so_ much simpler then. What I want right now is to be back in a bunk in a Pullman sleeper.”

“I understand, Colonel.” Korn herds him into his adjoining bedroom and sits with him on the bed, a hand up over his back and now kneading his right shoulder. “So, we’re in our little cabin in the Pullman. Bottom bunk; double berth. Earlier we went to dinner—”

“But only after they called us into the dining car,” Cathcart interrupts. “If your ride includes a meal they give you a slip, they put it outside your door, and it has a number and letter on it—you have to wait for them to call it to come.”

“To come to dinner.”

“Well, yeah, Blackie.”

“Your attention to detail astounds me, Colonel, continually,” Korn drawls. 

“What is it with you and clichés, Korn?” Cathcart asks.

Korn is taken aback. Cathcart _thinks_ in clichés. “Calling the kettle black, are we?”

Cathcart jumps on him: “See, that’s exactly what I mean!”

Korn crosses his arms and turns away, spitefully. “Well, if that’s how you’re going to be.” Let him beg a little. 

Cathcart is silent, but then, without warning, swipes his thumb over the fold of fat at the back of Korn's neck; "I like this," he says. Korn shivers, and turns back to him wearing an expression that he hopes reads as _the hell?_ “You think you’re so smart,” Cathcart asserts, smiling knowingly. “Finish the story. About the train.”

Korn sighs. “So we ate earlier. What’d we have?”

“I don’t know. Um, what were they serving?” Cathcart puts his legs up over Korn’s lap. He’s done this before, and each time Korn’s legs have fallen asleep beneath him.

Korn wants to avoid this eventuality, this time, and so he works a hand underneath Cathcart’s knees and scoots closer to him so that he’s nearly cradling him bridal-style. Across the threshold. “Well, I seem to recall that on the troop trains the menu’s limited. A choice of three entrees: whitefish, a porkchop, or steak.”

“Oh, steak.”

“A porkchop for me, I think. So we had our dinner. There was a toast for you at the end; they do that whenever they catch wind that there’s a decorated full colonel aboard.”

“I wasn’t a colonel when I left officer’s school. Only a major.”

“This is all taking place in the future, Chuck, after we’re recalled to the States.”

“Oh. What’d we have for dessert?” Cathcart is feeling around behind him for the pillows, stacking one on top of the other to make a backrest against the bedframe. Korn reaches over him to assist.

“Blueberry pie. We get back to our bunk, part the curtains.” Cathcart closes his eyes and reclines, and so Korn follows him up onto the bed, resting on an elbow because Cathcart has his pillow.

Cathcart giggles. “This is sorta like a honeymoon, huh, Blackie?”

“Hmn?” Korn grins wolfishly. “Why, I thought you’d never cotton on, Chuck.” He begins to roll over on top of Cathcart, moves to unbutton his trousers, but Cathcart interrupts:

“Like Nick and Nora in _The Thin Man_. D’you like those movies?”

“Haven’t seen them.” Korn falls back onto the mattress, thwarted.

“You ought to. See, at the end of the first one, Nick and Nora get on a train to San Francisco.”

“Oh yes? Care for San Francisco, Chuck?”

He wrinkled his nose. “I don’t know. Nick and Nora went there to meet her parents, in the second movie—my parents live in Dutchess County.”

Korn is amused by this prospect. He imagines the Cathcarts to be conscientious imitators of European landed gentry, effectors of the Old World opulence, in a somber, poorly-lit manor home complete with tapestries. He seems to recall Cathcart having mentioned something about a foxhunt in his youth. “Then we’re en route to their palatial country estate. Is that an accurate description, hmn?” He reaches over and tickles Cathcart under his jaw.

Cathcart screws his chin in against his neck to escape. “Ugh—I suppose!”

“Towed stateside by my warbride after victory in Europe, I am to meet the whole Cathcart clan. I’m sure they’ll be very pleased to have me.” Korn imagines sitting down to dinner at a long medieval table like William Randolph Hearst’s.

“Don’t be sarcastic. They would, too. They’d like you.” Korn fixes him with a look, but he doesn’t recant: “They would!”

“Alright. Alright, we take the train up from New York City along the Hudson. Past the little hamlets in between—”

“Ossining, Croton-Harmon, Peekskill, Beacon, Poughkeepsie,” Cathcart lists, counting on his fingers. Yossarian, seemingly, had been forgotten. Good.

“Sure. We disembark in Poughkeepsie. Now, would your family be there to pick us up?”

“They’d send a driver.”

“But of course.” Korn spreads his arms grandly. “Are there any faux-Swiss chateaus or mountain lodges nearby that we’d spend the night in?”

Cathcart cocked his head to the side. “No—I mean, sure there are, but we’d sleep in the house.”

“What, in your childhood bedroom?”

‘Well, why not?”

“Chuck, excuse my frankness, but: if not on the train or in a hotel, when’ll we get to screw?”

“In my room—we’ll put the radio on,” Cathcart says matter-of-factly. He lifts his arms up above his head. Korn takes his cue and peels Cathcart’s tee shirt from his chest, up over his chin, his nose, his brow: lifts his white veil.


	5. the war and us

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A followup to “037”: checking in on Belinda. So, uh, yeah, kidfic. Named for the Edward Okuń painting.

**1945**

The three of them steal away from the base in the grey predawn of New Year’s Day. The land all around them is soaked still from the week-long squall that had broken only the night before. They hitchhike in the open back of a Pianosan peasant’s bucolic horse-drawn haycart after slipping the driver a few lira. Belinda is bundled in a uniform overcoat, the smallest they could find but still far too large. She is dwarfed within it. With the coarse grey wool collar up around her face she resembles a pygmy Soviet, this tiny creature: a tough, drab, gap-toothed pigeon, with her stringy brown hair, in the damp straw, between her two fat fathers, neither of whom look anything like her. Held prisoner, as each of them has an arm locked through hers. Jutting out her bottom jaw. She has fallen to sullen silence after her plea to the cart’s driver to rescue her from these kidnappers was met with an impassive shrug. Fathers? It was the only word for them that made any sense. She didn’t look like either of them, no, but like Korn she was mean, like Cathcart vicious in a yappy way. There was an uneasy armistice between Belinda and her jailors, born of this commonality, but jailors they remained. If there was one thing at which Korn and Cathcart were adept, it was allying in a unified front against the disenfranchised. Up to this point that group had been represented by their airmen, only symbolically children for which they were responsible. Well, Korn had never had any trouble extending a metaphor.

Belinda breaks her vow of silence: she looks up at Korn and asks a question to the effect of “are we on the lam?” Cathcart looks up, as if he too wants to know. Korn sets his jaw like Belinda’s, adopts a grim Teutonic countenance. “Yes, my darlink,” he says in a silly German accent, not sure which of them, her or Cathcart, he’s addressing. Both? “Ve are var criminals.”

Belinda scowls. The accent doesn’t play well with her, naturally; Korn realizes that she’s probably been shouted down by real Germans in the streets of Rome. They disembark from the back of the cart when the driver passes the hill house’s long winding drive and begin the trek up to it, Belinda still held captive between them. She refuses to walk; they drag her. Steam floats off of the heather as sunrays begin to break through the clouds. They are solemn, all three of them, and walk in silence until Korn rummages in his knapsack and finds an orange, which he hands to Belinda as a peace offering. “From Spain,” he tells her. He feels she should know this; she likely hasn’t had much of an education.

“The Spaniards call them naranjas,” Cathcart adds, cryptically. Belinda looks embarrassed by and for both of them.

They reach the crest of the hill. The untended fields all around, green with weedy macchia in summer, are naught but weathertorn yellow scrub-brush now. Cathcart waits outside while Korn leads Belinda into the house, puts her to bed in a guest room and wedges a chair under the door to keep her there. He walks back outside to the hand-pump, planning on filling a kettle of water to boil for coffee, and finds Cathcart still looking out over the fields. What Cathcart wants, now that he’s given up his aspirations: a procession of people come to tell him they’re proud. Both generals, his parents, the men, Milo, Danby, the president, God—Korn likes to think he’d be last in the line. Cathcart would want a quantitative valuation of his life's worth, too, he'd want it in numbers. Korn can’t give him statistics: the only real substantive quantifiable achievement of Cathcart’s was his body count. Cathcart’s back was to him; maybe he was thinking now of the men he’d killed, mourning. Maybe the fields of the plain below were serving for him as a vast graveyard. But probably not. Cathcart had taken off his overcoat on the walk up the drive, and Korn sees now that he’s been wearing suspenders underneath. He is compelled by them to approach from behind, like a queen's retainer or chambermaid about to set in upon the task of corseting. Korn can’t provide a divine review of Cathcart’s life, but he can hook his chin over Cathcart’s shoulder, thread his arms under Cathcart’s and interlace his fingers over Cathcart’s belly. “Are we alright?” Korn asks, low. He isn’t sure whether he is employing, snidely, the royal we, or if he is asking earnestly that Cathcart finally fulfill the letter of his role as group commander: gauge their situation, strategize.

Cathcart doesn’t seem to know either. He crosses his arms and cups Korn’s elbows in his hands, cranes his neck just far back enough to put his stubbly left cheek to Korn’s right. “Yeah, Henry.”

In the months that followed, the Allies advanced up the Po Plain and Italy was Italy again; briefly it was a kingdom, and then there was the referendum that brought democracy. This news reached Cathcart and Korn and their ward through their kitchen radio, but affected them little. They wanted for almost nothing on the farm, being largely self-sufficient. They had a stall in the valley village’s market from which they sold tomatoes when they were in season. They had a clothesline out in the yard, and after the sale of a water cooler they acquired a fussy old beater of an Amilcar. The colonels tutored Belinda in English and a little French. Korn covered arithmetic, while Cathcart lent her some very dubious ideas about history and civics.

 

**1976**

Not until she is as old as Korn was when they met, 44, does Belinda try therapy. She sits in a ring of flimsy metal folding chairs with a slew of people half her age. The group’s facilitator, a thin woman with oversized hair and glasses, prompts her patients this week with a question about parents. Belinda grimaces. The task of establishing a frame of reference would be by nature much more arduous for her then for any of the others. To start, she brings up a certain satirical Second World War novel, written in the early sixties. “About the Americans, but by an Italian lady. Luciana Lucchese.”

The therapist nods. “I read it in college, with everyone else.”

Belinda, heartened, continues: “Do you remember the villains?”

The therapist wrinkles her nose. “You mean the profiteer? Kanowski?”

Belinda sighs. “No, there were others.”

After the war in Europe ended and the Americans withdrew, il Colonnello e Charles took her to Rome, periodically. They called these holidays, but really their purpose was always to search for Belinda’s sister. Sometimes both of the men accompanied her through her sister’s old haunts (brothels, of course, cheap bistros, and dingy American-style moviehouses with seats upholstered in faux damask) and other times only one, while the other, having lost patience, hung back at the hotel. 

Belinda would always insist that they visit a Roman bath—that is an indoor public bathhouse, the kind that Clara had loved and to which she had occasionally treated Belinda, if she had slept well the night before and made some money, if she’d had a good day and felt magnanimous. They weren’t real _thermae_ , of course, but gaudy recreations with pornographic murals of the ancient gods engaged in improprieties— _ficky-ficking_ , Clara had told her. Maybe, was Belinda’s justification, maybe Clara would be there this time, maybe this time at this particular bath they’d find her. Really Belinda just liked the bath: the steam and the smell of foamy salts, the way conversation echoed. Being clean had long been a luxury for her, and she was naturally nosy and deprived of gossip on the colonels’ farm. In the bathhouse she could scrub herself of dirt and eavesdrop on others until she’d had her fill, whereupon she’d hold her nose and dunk her head under the water.

So Charles and the old man would oblige her, pay for entrance and part with her to file into the _degli uomini_ sector, separated from the _delle donne_ by a tile wall. More than once, during the Occupation and before, Clara had left her there in the bath, had without warning snuck out with a client she’d found in one of the back rooms, leaving Belinda to dry herself off and find her own way home. Therefore on her Roman holidays with the colonels Belinda would holler periodically over the dividing wall: “Are you still there?” She’d be surprised, always, by the desperation she’d hear in her own reedy voice. To distract from it she’d add more profanity: “You haven’t left me, have you, you rotten stinking rat bastards? You old coots?” Il Colonnello would reply “sì” or “no,” wearily, as many times as she asked, through a frieze of Pluto or Jupiter. Once Belinda had tried to pull her sister’s trick and sneak out while her guardians were still soaking, but she had found them dry in the lobby when she emerged from the changing room. They’d looked the way they did whenever she tried to run away, which had been often in the first year: more than anything else self-satisfied with having thwarted her. Raised her again. Il Colonnello—Henry—had toweled off her wet hair, roughly, and Charles had gathered her up in his arms, even though she was too big for that. Night had fallen, violently, while they were in the bathhouse, and it was dark when they shuffled out onto the street.

The next day Henry had left the sister-hunting to Charles and Belinda, while he occupied himself in finding a buyer for their air conditioner. Their supply of paper money had run thin, and they needed some to finance these excursions; it had been decided that the bulky AC unit would be their sacrificial bull. If Pianosan villagers saw no use for it, surely urbanite Romans would. Henry had returned from hawking it to find Belinda and Charles sitting for a 25-lira portrait from a man on the street with a palette and easel, an enterprising entrepreneur. Sitting side-by-side, for Belinda had insisted she was too old for Charles’s knee. Because this had occurred in the first year of their exile, Henry had scolded Charles for letting anyone get a good look at him, let alone paint a portrait. But then Henry had haggled the portraitist down to 18 lira (“or we no buy at all, _capische_?”) and in retribution the portraitist had, discreetly, dipped his thumb in his Brown Ochre and left a stamp-sized print in the corner of the canvas, tan with two little white circles for Henry’s glasses lenses. None of them noticed it, noticed _him_ up there in the corner, until they were halfway back to the hotel. Henry had laughed when he did, had sort of liked it.

Belinda had kept the painting. It hung in her hall now, one of the few pieces of proof she had of who she’d spent that decade of her life with: _that sunburnt man with the pained smile was my father, or the nearest thing I had to one. And that thing in the corner that looks like the sun, that’s my other father._

She’d called him Il Colonnello, or sometimes Il Duce, because if he bore no great resemblance to Mussolini he was at least bald and dictatorial—she had seen him then primarily as her own personal dictator. In fact Henry had always reminded her most of all of the elderly pimp for whom Clara had worked, back in Rome, the perpetually disheveled old man with whom poor Nately had always argued. Charles she’d called by his first name because he’d often felt like a protective older brother, but there was no mistaking Henry Korn for anything but a father. The man was preternaturally fatherly. She knew vaguely that he and Charles were a couple but didn’t entirely grasp what that entailed until she was older—just as she didn’t understand her sister’s occupation, not really, not until she’d lived with the colonels for a few years.

Why did she stay with them? Well, she did try to escape. Why didn't she try harder? Because it had been war, and then anarchic post-war, and because she was always a pragmatist. She saw quickly that they didn't mean her harm and recognized that this was a rare thing. She was a cynic already at twelve. She knew for a fact that she had no-one else in the world, no-one. Though their natures forced them to keep one another at arm's length, she and Henry recognized pragmatism and cynicality in one another. It was an affectionate arm’s length.

Belinda, who never knew her biological parents, now thinks of him in one of his last days. As sharp, as acerbic as he ever was. As bald, as jowly, and as much the queeny _roué_ , wheezing with emphysemic laughter at his own jokes, tubes up his nostrils.

“I was raised by deposed gay American war criminals,” Belinda Cathcart tells the therapy group.

The facilitator reclines in her folding chair, takes a drag on her cigarette. With it she gestures around to the rest of the participants. “And weren’t we all, in a way?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As you can see, I wrote this whole thing in service of that punchline.
> 
> Kanowski was the name of the mess hall officer upon whom Milo was based, as per Patricia Chapman Meder’s _The True Story of Catch-22_ (which is, like, poorly written but informative). I thought, hey, if Luciana became an author after the events of _Catch-22_ , and is the in-universe version of Joseph Heller, she might as well fictionalize Yossarian’s group members’ names as their real-life selves’ names. Does that make any sense?
> 
> If you’re interested in actual life in rural Italy during the leadup to the end of the war, read Iris Origo’s _War in Val d’Orcia_. Thanks for reading my stupid crap, though!


End file.
